A history of fire suppression in the United States

Wildfires have been the story of Utah's summer where, as of August 10, a record 514,000 acres have burned. Of that figure, 290,000 acres of woodland forest alone have succumbed—a figure being tracked closely by Phil Dennison, professor in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability at the University of Utah—which shatters the previous record by more than 50,000 acres. And the fire season isn't over yet.

Since national tracking of wildfires in the US began in the 1980s, the average number of fires has remained constant at 70,000 annually, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. However, the acreage has increased by 43%—on average a fire is more destructive than it was 40 years ago.

So why is this happening? Climate change is one aspect of the issue. But as with most things, the story is more complex than that. In fact, our fear of fire itself might be largely to blame.

Historical stewards

Brent Steele, distinguished professor of political science at the University of Utah, recently published the paper with Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland Matt McDonald "On Fire: Western and Indigenous Approaches to Nature in Settler Colonial Societies" which tells the story of how these lands used to be managed and how that has affected our current situation. 

According to Steele and McDonald, for thousands of years Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS) involved seasonal prescribed burns of forests and woodlands. IFS was seen not as a destructive force to the land but as a medicine. Fire was akin to water or earth and seen as a spirit which freely exists in nature. Indigenous Peoples saw nature as an interconnected ecosystem of which they were just one part. 

In instances where fire does not exist because it is suppressed, they say, less drought resilient species crowd out the ecosystem and fuels rapidly build up. By periodically burning the land, these drought-resilient species thrived and the fires which passed through acted differently. 

Prescribed fires slowly crept along the forest floor—clearing the space for new growth. There was not enough fuel for fires to jump to the canopy creating a catastrophic "crown blaze." The result was a landscape largely covered by widely spaced old-growth pines with plenty of sunlight for grasses, wildflowers and shrubs which are beneficial for many game animals. 

Even smoke, the authors add, was seen as a positive force. It helped to block sunlight and cool down water ways during the warm months of summer. Pest control was another benefit, smoke effectively fumigated boreal forests of pests which preyed on native food sources like acorns.

Enter American colonization

When American settlers first encountered IFS—which had been taking place for millennia—it was viewed with suspicion. Hence, as land ownership shifted from Indigenous People to the new arrivals in the young American nation, these practices were largely ignored. Western thought of the time saw nature and humans as binary, completely separate from each other.

Some of the first policies that dealt with forest management worked to limit logging. In 1891, new forest reserves were allocated by the government excluding private industry, like logging. Deforestation from the logging industry prompted the creation of the National Forest Service and its foundational views that private industry was not capable of ensuring the survival of forests into the future.

In 1910, a series of large fires raged in Washington, Montana and Idaho, setting 3 million acres of land ablaze in just two days. Three of the men who  fought these fires eventually served as forest service chiefs and advocated for fire suppression, a policy that became the official mission of the Forest Service. But policy can be ineffective without public support. The Forest Service needed something for the people to rally behind.  

During World War II on September 9, 1942, a Japanese floatplane launched from an I-25 submarine near Brookings, Oregon. The floatplane carried incendiary bombs intending  to set the Sisikiyou National Forest ablaze. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful, but the event had a lasting impact on fire management policy. 

Following the failed attack, the Forest Service released a poster depicting gruesome drawings of Axis power leaders Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo in front of an intense wildfire. The message: fires are bad, and you should do everything in your power to prevent them. But it's no surprise that the poster ended up being too intense for many Americans, so the Forest Service created a new campaign with a bear resembling an upstanding and charismatic park ranger. His name was Smokey the Bear and he was found everywhere, intoning the catchphrase, "Only you can prevent forest fires." 

Later, Smokey changed the tagline in 2021 to "Only you can prevent wildfires," to address fires in non-forested areas (like grasslands) and to clarify that Smokey opposes unplanned accidents, not beneficial, controlled prescribed burns. Even so, Baby Boomers and GenXers who spent decades hearing "forest fires," have brains that are naturally resistant to the change. A fact that has resonance today in how we treat wildfires.